Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/177

CONSTRUCTION. 155 that represents one of the principal monuments of ancient Babylon, there is nothing between the bricks but earth that must have been placed there in the condition of mud. 1 These bricks may be detached almost without effort. It is quite otherwise with the two other ruins in the same neighbourhood, called respectively Kasr and Birs-Nimroud. Their bricks are held together by an excellent mortar of lime, and cannot be separated without break- ing. 2 Elsewhere, at Mugheir for instance, the mortar is composed of lime and ashes. 3 Finally, the soil of Mesopotamia furnished, and still furnishes, a kind of natural mortar in the bituminous fountains that spring through the soil at more than one point between Mossoul and Bagdad. 4 It is hardly ever used in these days except in boat- building, for coating the planks and caulking. In ancient times its employment was very general in the more carefully constructed buildings, and, as it was found neither in Greece nor Syria, it made a great impression upon travellers from those countries. They noted it as one of the characteristics of Chaldsean civilization. In the Biblical account of the Tower of Babel we are told : " They had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar." 5 Herodotus lays stress upon the same detail in his description of the way in which the walls of Babylon were built : " As they dug the ditches they converted the excavated earth into bricks, and when they had enough, they burnt them in the kiln. Finally, for mortar they used hot bitumen, and at every thirty courses of bricks they put a layer of reeds interlaced." 6 Those walls have long ago disappeared. For many centuries their ruins afforded building materials for the inhabitants of the cities that have succeeded each other upon and around the site of ancient Babylon, and now their lines are only to be faintly traced in slight undulations of the ground, which are here and there 1 LAYARD, Discoveries, &c. p. 503. 2 LAYARD, Discoveries, pp. 499 and 506. 3 TAYLOR, Notes on the Ruins of Mngeyr (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xv. p. 261). This mortar is still employed in the country ; it is called kharour. 4 The most plentiful springs occur at Hit, on the middle Euphrates. They are also found, however, farther north, as at Kaleh-Shergat, near the Tigris. Over a wide stretch of country in that district the bitumen wells up through every crack in the soil (LAYARD, Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 46). As for the bituminous springs of Hammam-Ali, near Mossoul, see PLACE, Ninive et V Assyrie, vol. i. p. 236. ' Genesis xi. 3. r > HERODOTUS, i. 179.